Old Blog

I started blogging occasionally some years back, circa 2008 I guess; and it's been pretty on and off since then. However it's been on a couple of platforms like wordpress and blogspot etc. Over the coming weeks I'm going to try and gather up some of those old articles and republish them here. However I'm going to republish them with their original publication date, so that this site has some sense of chronological order. Please excuse the mess in the meantime, and perhaps enjoy some of these old musings. I will also tag them with the tag "old blog".

I won't move across all articles, probably leaving behind anything that is just opinion, is very dated or just lacks any real relevance. If you really want to see it, most of it's at garyquigley.wordpress.com.

I wanted to talk about the new web browser by Google, namely "Chrome". If you are interested in taking a look at this you can download it from here.

It could be argued that we really don't need any more browsers out there what with Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera and so on. However, I always felt that it was inevitable that Google would want to create a browser that it could control. I think that the rest of these are pretty much very similar, a feature appears in one and then the next release of the others have features that are comparable. On this front Chrome isn't actually a lot different, but somehow you know that Google will end up taking a large market share of the browser market.

So the topic for today is Cloud computing... like most of the subject matter I cover with this blog I am by no means an expert, but I think that it's an area that is going to become far more prevalent very quickly, so I wanted to give a view on it in the vague hope that someone out there is listening!. If nothing else this works as a cathartic exercise to get these technologies that I "understand" into a written form which helps to solidify the idea in my head...

A quick and easy way of doing this is with the excellent Bullzip Access to MySQL tool available from http://www.bullzip.com/products/a2m/info.php. You can either transfer directly into a MySQL database or you can create a dump file instead.

Best thing about it is the fact that it is highly configurable and free! There is a commercial version available if the free version doesn’t have the features that you need.

Also if you need to split a SQL dump into multiple parts because of file size restrictions of any kind, you may want to look out for SQLDumpSplitter 2 by Philip Lehmann-Bohm, (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., www.philiplb.de).

Part of the day job is to offer pre-sales consultancy on a product called Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

This is speech recognition software and as such allows you you to write emails, documents by speaking through a headset to your computer. You can also control the Windows interface just by voice - so you can open windows, close windows, minimise, mouse left click, right click etc, and also do natural language command web searches.

In the process of rebuilding my website at cheekie.net with the beta version of Joomla 1.7, I kept running into an issue whenever I added any custom HTML code into the site. Whenever I created a module to add the custom code required to use StatCounter or other custom modifications, the code would be mangled or deleted completely every time the module was saved.

This afternoon I thought I was going to have a coronary! Watching the last Formula 1 race of the year and watching Lewis win the F1 world championship on the last corner..... wow! The last time I got so emotional about a race was when Damon Hill won in 1996 - I didn't sit down for the last half-hour of the race, and when Vettel passed I though it was all over - but to see Glock slip-slide out of the way because of a gamble on tyre choice at the end...!

WOW!

Well done Lewis you deserve it and well done Massa, you did all you possibly could have - you were a great opponent in the end! Roll on Melbourne 2009!

James Senior has published a new post on mesh here describing using Live Mesh with different kinds of devices.

In essence there are four types of devices available - Creators, Consumers, Rich End-Points and Processors.

Creators are devices that create content and put it into the mesh for synchronization to devices. Sot this could be a digital camera that is connected by an eye-Fi SD card to the Mesh.

Consumers would be devices that can consume information synchronized in Live Mesh, which could be a picture or a mp3 player.

Rich End-points are the computers and devices that want to do more than create or consume content.

Processors are devices that might carry out a service behind the scenes for the user or their devices in their Mesh. An example of a processor might be online backup where your data can be backed up in the background to a storage device outside of your existing Mesh.

When you view Mesh in this context, it really seems that they sky is the limit!

So I guess any blog has to start with a post of some kind, and obviously this is going to be mine… There you go; my first statement of the obvious!

In principle I don’t actually get blogs… Now there’s a good statement to start a blog with. Why don’t I get them? Well who’s interested in what I have to say?! I guess, in principle no-one is and everyone is at the same time – it just depends on what you have to say. I did start one a number of years ago, but I didn’t do it for very long.

Just recently I attended one of Microsoft's TechEd roadshows on virtualisation. And it must be said that these guys really know how to do an educational show. This particular session was headed by James O'Neill, whose blog you can read here.

I did have a degree of understanding of virtualisation before, simply by playing around with VMWare's server and workstation products. Today I have always used them for 2 basic uses:- to create an isolated PC environment to test a new bit of software, or to evaluate a new operating system such as Ubuntu Linux.

The line that came out of the day that described virtualisation the best was this -- "Virtualisation is about abstracting one layer on the technology stack from the next layer". Makes sense to me!

However what I hadn't really considered before was the various different types of virtualisation. In essence there are 4 different types...

You could write your site in HTML from scratch. HTML is the acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language - the 'script' behind the greater percentage of websites. HTML is very easy to learn and write and is really quite intuitive. Why not read more about it at the World Wide Web Consortium, (W3C), website.

Much as it's name implies it's a server for the home - all clear? no? Let me explain!!

Generally in an office environment there is a computer dedicated to providing services of one kind or another to any number of users at the same time within that networked environment. These services could be just to provide storage space so that users can store data of any kind in an area other than on their own machine - for backups of their machine for instance, or as a store for less frequently used files, so as not to clog up their own PC's hard disk with little used files. This computer is generally called a file server or just a server for short.